Figure 3.

Self-digitization disc and digital polymerase chain reaction (dPCR) reader for nucleic acid detection and quantitation in low-resource settings. (a) Self-digitization disc. (b) The self-digitization disc (left) can be made with material similar to a conventional CD (right) and using a similar process. (c) The optical disc–style dPCR reader is portable and affordable. (d) dPCR works by partitioning nucleic acids in a sample into thousands or even millions of nanoliter compartments containing one or more nucleic acid molecules. After amplification, any compartment that contains at least one of the target molecules will produce a positive signal.